An eerie link between harsh reality and scary fiction: Famed
mystery writer John Sandford (real name John Camp), is just out with his 13th
Prey novel, a St. Louis-based thriller titled Mortal Prey. Now here's the weird angle. Camp,
who lives near St. Paul, Minn., wrote this book after touring our town taking
in the sights and nabes [1] that would give geographic
legitimacy to his novel. Unknowingly, his Mortal
Prey had elements that turned out to be very close to the real life
serial killer cases involving a Ferguson man charged in the deaths of two
prostitutes. Maury Troy Travis, accused of the serial killings, was recently
found hanged in the St. Louis County jail, an apparent suicide. All this
happened after a letter was sent to Post-Dispatch reporter Bill Smith, which
led to the discovery of another woman's body and the arrest of Travis.
Sandford's Mortal Prey has the brother of a
fugitive contract killer committing suicide in the St. Louis County jail while
the contract killer gets in touch by phone with a Post-Dispatch columnist, a
move that leads to the same path that occurred in the real case. When Sandford
(Camp) [2] saw the P-D articles, he said, "You are now going
to be subject to a whole blizzard of conspiracy theories . . . the guy was
actually murdered to shut him up, who else was involved in the murder ring,
etc."

Footnotes

1. The Shorter Oxford English
Dictionary defines "nabe" as "a local cinema", and reports that it's US
slang. Personally, I've never heard it before this. Must be a St. Louis
thing.

2. I assume the parenthetical aside
here is just in case the reader had forgotten the author's real name since
reading it half a paragraph above.

Webmaster @ JohnSandford . org13 August 2018

The Prey series, the Virgil Flowers series,
the Kidd series, The Singular Menace, The Night Crew, Dead
Watch, The Eye and the Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle,
and Plastic Surgery: The Kindest Cut are copyrighted by John Sandford.
All excerpts are used with permission.